Microsoft vs. Google: It's on

Microsoft asked European regulators Thursday to go after Google on antitrust grounds, accusing the search giant of trying to “entrench its dominance” on the Web.

It’s a major escalation in the war between the two tech titans.

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Microsoft and other Google foes say Google’s powerful search engine and its move into other markets — from advertising to mobile phones to travel — has stunted industrywide competition. Google has described itself as under siege — the victim of a Microsoft-led “anti-Google industrial complex.”

In an early-morning blog post Thursday, Microsoft executive Brad Smith said the company’s European Commission filing accuses Google of having “engaged in a broadening pattern of walling off access to content and data that competitors need to provide search results to consumers and to attract advertisers.”

Smith offered a litany of examples of what he describes as Google's anticompetitive practices — arguing, for instance, that Google has disadvantaged competitors in video search, promoted its search boxes through exclusivity deals and sought to leverage its size over competitors in the neophyte e-book market.

"We readily appreciate that Google should continue to have the freedom to innovate. But it shouldn’t be permitted to pursue practices that restrict others from innovating and offering competitive alternatives," Smith said. "That’s what it’s doing now. And that’s what we hope European officials will assess and ultimately decide to stop."

“We're not surprised that Microsoft has done this, since one of their subsidiaries was one of the original complainants," Google officials said in a statement. "For our part, we continue to discuss the case with the European Commission and we're happy to explain to anyone how our business works."

The complaint filed with European Union regulators, the first time Microsoft has formally alleged antitrust violations by a competitor, comes as Google is under increased scrutiny back home — from the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and among state attorneys general.

Last week, a federal judge validated some of the claims of Google antitrust critics by blocking the company's plans to create a universal digital library, partly because those plans would preclude competitors from doing so. DOJ has spent months scrutinizing how Google's $700 million purchase of travel software firm ITA would affect the online travel market.

Texas last year launched a broader investigation into whether Google manipulates its search results to hurt competitors.

On Wednesday, the FTC announced a settlement with Google over the launch of the company’s Buzz social network. Under the settlement, Google will have to submit to outside monitoring of its privacy policies over the next two decades.

Now the fight intensifies in Europe, where regulators since late 2010 have eyed Google for potential threats to industry competition.

A number of small but notable players have weighed into that battle, but Microsoft's new filing is likely to add an even more heightened level of intensity to the European Commission's antitrust investigation — the first of any sort targeting Google internationally.

In his 1,500-plus-word blog post describing Microsoft's concerns, Smith directly challenged Google's common retort to critics: that consumers are "a click away" from using a different search engine if Google disappoints. There are numerous other ways, Smith argued, that Google can entrench its dominance in both search and search advertising.